GSOC 2017 Ideas

This is the D Google Summer of Code page for 2017 - it is currently under construction. If you are interested in participating in the 2017 GSOC as either a student or mentor, and want to do something related to D, please feel free to contact our GSOC administrator Craig Dillabaugh (firstname dot lastname at gmail dot com).

Timeline

Ideas

Plenty of challenging and important projects exist in the D world. They range from writing new or improving existing modules of D's standard library (Phobos), working on its compilers (Compilers), shaping GUI libraries for D, integrating D with other languages and more.

Mir Project

Project Description

The Mir project is developing numerical libraries for the upcoming numeric packages of
the Dlang standard library. The are numerous projects an interested student could pursue:

University project. Your GSoC project can be combined with your scientific research.

SDC Project - D Compiler as a Library

Project Description

The SDC project (https://github.com/deadalnix/SDC) is an effort to provide a D compiler as a library.
Any ideas to further the development of this project are welcome, but for a student who would like a specific project we
propose the following

Start by implementing with @property feature of D. This feature will allow a D programmer to create functions that are called using the same syntax as variable access.

Using the @property feature the student will be able to implement the runtime support for slices and associative arrays. The operations to implement are as follows:

Implement arrray operations like concatenation and appending, and implement a sound memory management strategy for the underlying data.

Implement a generic and efficient hash table. The data structure and algorithms used must be flexibile enough to be adapted to any type of data that might be stored in the table. A concurrent version of the table is need for shared data.

Finally, the student will implement masquerading of D syntax into calls for the runtime.

Integrate LLVM's new JIT infrastructure in SDC, the On-Request Compilation JIT (ORCJit) API. This would simplify the implementation of certain D features such as Compile Time Function Evaluation (CTFE) for SDC.

Its Good To Know

SDC is developed in D (of course) so you will need to be proficient in D by the time you start coding.

You should have taken at least one course on compilers, or at the least be willing to educate yourself in this regard. There is a decent course availabe through Coursera https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers

You should familiarize yourself with classicial data structures for arrays and have knowledge of various schemes for table implementations, (it is worthwhile to read up on hopscotch and robin hood hashing).

FlatBuffers Support and/or Improved Protocol Buffer Support

Project Description

FlatBuffers is an efficient cross platform serialization library for C++, C#, C, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Python. It was originally created at Google for game development and other performance-critical applications.

Currently there is no support for D, so this project would involve building FlatBuffers support from scratch. The goal of the project is to contribute the D support to the upstream repository.

Regarding Protocol Buffers, existing work has been done to provide support for D, however, there are a number of areas that can be improved including:

Its Good To Know

Lowerer

Project Description

This tool would "translate" compilable D code to compilable D code. See initial idea discussed in Issue 5051. It would offer a variety of lowering services for purposes of tooling, debugging, and project management:

do not output function bodies, .di style

write deduced attributes for functions (useful when function bodies are not written)

expand all possible mixins in the code

execute lookup on all symbols and write the full symbol, e.g. writeln becomes .std.stdio.writeln

fork()-based Garbage Collector

Project Description

Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera and Vincent Russo authored a paper on an interesting take on a garbage collector: leverage efficient fork() implementations, which in many Unix systems take advantage of hardware-provided copy-on-write semantics for duplicated memory pages across processes.

This idea is already leveraged in the high-performance garbage collector for D implemented and used by Sociomantic. (A lingering issue is fork() and malloc() share a lock, which is problematic.) Leandro Lucarella, the engineer who wrote the implementation, has open sourced it here, but that is a bitrotten version that has fallen on the wayside.

Leandro would be glad to assist with questions by a motivated implementer. Gustavo has quite a few ideas for improvements, including a possible Windows implementation, and may be able to even coauthor a paper.

Linux debugger

Project Description

ZeroBUGS is a high-quality, source-level debugger for Linux implemented from first principles in C++ by Cristian Vlasceanu. The author got busy with work and the project has since bitrotten, as did a fork of it by a different engineer.

ZeroBUGS presents amazing opportunities for D/Linux debugging, and Cristian is willing to guide a motivated implementer.

Who's (Using) Who?

Project Description

It happens often that executables include code that seems unused (e.g. a typical "hello world" links in functions that are not easily explained). A tool that shows dependency chains would be a great helper in understanding what dependencies are at work, and would give insight into how to reduce them.

The tool would output for each function all symbols it uses. The tool's output would be in one (or more) popular format of stock tools for graph drawing, such as DOT, Graphviz, Sage, PGF/TikZ, newGRAPH, etc.

This can be done using Valgrind's plugin, Callgrind, as explained here.

std.i18n

Design and implement a basic internationalization framework. It may be possible to implement this with pragma(msg). For proof of concept see http://arsdnet.net/dcode/i18n.d . It should provide at least the following functionality:

A locale part, std.i18n.locale which should detect a user's default lanaguage, select a global application lanaguage, and provide types to describe and work with locales.

A text translation part, std.i18n.translation, which should be gettext compatible, preferably using the gettext serialized hashtables in .mo files, and provide low level (gettext like) and high level (boost::locale like) APIs.

A tool to extract strings which need to be translated from D code. This should preferably be based on DScanner but alternately could use regular expressions. Optionally support for D code could be added to xgettext.

std.parallelism

std.parallelism needs a review and some benchmarking - prior to making improvements. As part of this is would be good to have a standard benchmarking framework, hence the idea of std.benchmark. However there is no need for it to be in std (and hence Phobos) in the first instance. So the project(s) would be to create a comparative benchmarking framework that can then be used to analyse std.parallelism on a more scientific basis than has been done to date.

std.units

Unit conversion library

std.serialization

A flexible (de)serialization framework that can be used as a standardized building block for various serialization related things: std.json, std.csv, Protocol Buffers, Cap'n Proto, vibe.d... One important goal would be to define how a user-specified type has to work in order to make it serializable, as well as to allow the end-user (e.g. a user of std.json) to change the serialization of third-party types that cannot themselves be modified. A good starting point is would be to work with the Orange framework.

std.eventloop

Phobos inclusion will require that the event loop abstraction is not baked into a specific purpose as that comes later.
The specific events, sources and consumers must be configurable and high performant. Existing solution that is well tested in this manner is glib's event loop. The closest to this design in D would be SPEW.

For this work to succeed the following things must be in Phobos:

The abstraction

An example implementation of the event loop

Available in the community:

Sockets support

Windowing support

To simplify matters only Windows support needs to be included for the example sources and consumers of events.

This work would allow D to have a high performance (and correctly performing) windowing, timers and sockets libraries that can integrate should the sources be cross supported.

The biggest domain limitation to this work would be threading. The event loop library should be aware that some sources and consumers may be required to be thread only, global only, or both.

std.graph

Graphs are used in all sorts of contexts - from low-level network communication to high-level data science.
At the moment there is only one unmaintained D library, but
Boost::graph would be a good direction.

DUB: D's package manager

Project Description

DUB - D's package manager - is one of the central infrastructure tools in the D world as a convenient build and package management tool for the D community.
With D gaining more and more popularity, it's also a key tool to guarantee D's further adoption.
Thus there are many great ideas to improve DUB:

Propose your own project

Project Description

Do you have your own vision for improving D's success? That's great!
Are you convinced that your project helps to advance open source technology related to the D programming language?
Then simply get in touch with D's GSoC org admin (Craig) and potential mentors for your project.